“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Entities with still broader range need more complicated structure. The scope of their receptivity is so large that the simple autonomic nervous system is not enough. The amoeba constructs each idea it receives, because it is able to receive so few. All must be constructed to ensure survival. With man, the opposite becomes true. He has such a range of receptivity that it is impossible for him to construct all of his ideas physically. As his scope widened, a mechanism was necessary that would allow him to choose. Self-consciousness and reason were the answers.

Suddenly, time blossomed like a strange flower in his skull. Before this he was transfixed in the present. But memory produced another dimension in the animal and man carried it further. No longer did memory flicker briefly and disappear, enclosing him in darkness again. Now it stretched brightly behind him and also stretched out ahead — a road on which he always saw his own changing image.

He learned continuity. And with his focused memory at his command, man’s ego was born, which could follow its own identity through the maze of blazing impulses that beset him, could recognize itself through the pattern of continuing constructions and could separate itself from its action in the physical world. Here you have the birth of subject and object, the I AM who is the doer or constructor, and the construction itself.